~ My thoughts in my words

Monthly Archives: April 2009

The industry that started in the late 90s and soared in the early 21st century finally seems to be consolidating itself. Layoffs, performance expectations, cost cutting et al has become the order of the day, making IT hardly a newly graduate’s paradise, a status it held until sometime ago.

I remember learning about it when I joined my engineering course way back in 1998. the pay packages seemed good, way better than what most industries could offer. And it was this statistic that determined how hot a branch was. Statistics still hold the same importance, its only that IT has lost its position to the (more volatile) financial sector, the retail sector.

This recession will give a new meaning to the industries the world over. It is being compared to the great depression of 1929. although it may not be true, it is evident that if things have to go wrong, they can get worse than ever before, thanks to complexities of financial instruments.

Which career is recession proof? That’s a question every student is asking, having seen that things cannot always be good. The answer to this may be easy, but the implementation is not. A recession proof industry is one for which there is a perpetual demand, irrespective of the economic cycles. And that includes food (as hunger cycles don’t follow economics), FMCG, medical domain (our current lifestyle does not leave much room for good health), transportation (people will move, irrespective of how much money they have), chartered accountants (needed to certify the books – and manipulate them), government service (the ultimate source of constant income), politics (we are a democracy with a large population) and more.

In any industry, mantra for success is to be good. And to show that you are.

A while ago, a colleague casually asked me about my big plans for the weekend, I could not help being amused. I told him that every weekend I’ve spent in Ahmedabad and at office, has turned out to be loss of precious moments. And why shouldn’t it be? Every moment spent in office feels like exile, notwithstanding the good moments we have talking and having fun (at the client’s expense, of course).

In the companies I have worked for till now (including the current one), a five day week is the norm. But when it comes to adhering Indian clients that follow a six week schedule, things aren’t that easy. And so while sometimes we try to be ‘with them’, we prefer taking liberty to take the Saturday off as a fundamental right. Now why it is that while some companies have a five day work week, some stick to six? It may be said that a five day week is a fad, and it would take some time to become a norm. It is also seen that the new age industries work Monday to Friday, the traditional ones still prefer working on Saturday, much to the grunt to its employees.What makes companies devise such policies?

For one, companies with past experience of being burdened of overtime whenever extra labor hours are extracted, they prefer keeping a buffer to keep their unwarranted expenses low. But what about those where extra hours don’t translate to additional pay? Why don’t they stick to five day week, with the compulsion to stay till the work is done? Well, that would mean empowering the employees, and this comes from the theory Y. And not all organizations have woken up to the fact that employees can actually have a sense of responsibility.

Two: things have happened in the past, and there is no change agent to make things happen.

Three: As my manager once quipped, for industries which are working 24×7, there is always a crisis that needs to be dealt with, for us Indians cannot plan well. We believe in procrastinating till the last moment, and taking it from there. To handle such moments, a lot of shouting and go-getting takes place, and some people are just too pleased to have it around them (I happened to experience a lot of such instances in the stint with my present client). Fourth: we Indians do not give too much importance to our personal lives (this trend is changing though, check out any hot spots on weekends). And with this frame of mind, we do not mind taking up the additional responsibility of showing that work is being done.

We Indians are used to struggle: for we have to fight everyday. And some people seem to like it. And so to match the aspirations for those more Indian, I need to feel the pain of seeing my precious days going down the drain!

Sunday will come and go in a jiffy, leaving me to wonder whether I am human after all. Call it a downside of new experiences!

Fashion trends often begin at the ramp, though they have even been known to spark off at obscure stores as well. But by and large, a fad is best propagated when media is involved. The social responsibility of the media to present news and views often leads to ideas no one had thought before.

Of late, a lot of shoes have taken over the media. And they are not classified according to the brands, but who they are targeted at. During my childhood, I knew of shoes being used as weapon of protest (or perhaps rotten tomatoes and eggs), but never thought that being used in such a major scale; event to the extent of being reported and discussed in the international media.

What started as an initiative by an Iraqi reporter (does anyone remember his name?), turned out to be a fad among the journalists across the world. And with General elections in India this year and politicians going all the way to attract votes, the shoe has now become an object of displeasure.

I remember having read somewhere that the shoes thrown at Bush became famous in the international collector’s market, fetching somewhere around $300. Suddenly the shoe-maker became rich, thanks to the journalist (was his name Muntazer al-Zaidi?). Indians have now taken the cue from there to protest against Chidambaram, and the large number of other speakers (political and not) are now facing the riot. It won’t be long before even business leaders will think twice before addressing the media.

To me, shoe throwing is an interesting way to grab attention. But when there are too many shoes being flung around, an extra shoe won’t help. And who knows, some one might actually be collecting all of them to sell in the gray market! What’s the next step? Rotten eggs and tomatoes?

This morning on the way to office, my PM commented that our work leaves us with little of imagination, and so the right brain dies with time. he seemed to be disturbed by the fact that he doesn’t listen to music any more, and this 13 year stereo lies at home for want of repair. Whatever happened to his ear for music seems to have deafened into something irreversible. It made me wonder, what do we do to be more intuitive and less logical?
My work revolves around logical things. There are things to do, things to learn and things to map. And so the left brain is at its best during working hours. But do I make good use of the right brain? Do I feel things, imagine things or appreciate things in their totality? I think I do, but before I lose that, I need to do something.

But what is that something? It can be indulging in more creative pursuits, look for possibilities, believe in things, and do that the logical brain does not.

I got an interesting link; the website claims to identify if the viewer’s left or right brain functions predominantly. My perception came to the conclusion that it keeps switching between left and the right. How does yours work??

IT came into the world as a batch processing system; one of the earliest applications of computers lay in number crunching, and was a big boon to accountants who wanted bigger and faster calculators with some memory. It went over to payroll processing, batch processing, printing and communicating. Computers promised to make lives of the end users easier, to ensure senior management got to know whats happening in the company, to trace any goof ups…in short, enterprise applications were meant to automate things by repetitive processing.

It took some time for the concept to percolate through, and initially I found public sector banks ending up with agitated customers because of the delays caused by ‘computerization’. I have even seen fears of job losses because of this concept. But as any disruptive innovation matures, there is larger acceptance and people tend to get used to it, and thus perceive the benefits.

So the keyword was automation, since things happened automatically. Applications in various platforms were developed as and when required, and it appeared to solve all problems. Until ERP came into picture, all problems could be solved my using tools that made things simpler.

My experiences with the present client gave taught me something new: that the users expect the new ‘software’ to make things ‘automatic’ so that they would have to do less work. They are awfully unaware of the fact that the basic essence of an ERP system is integration and not automation. Unfortunately, the top management has done a poor job of percolating this message (do they understand it themselves?). And so the demands of having more automatic systems creep up. The Indian client has somehow got the message that things can be automated by what is known as custom development, and so more and more developments are demanded that will ensure they work in their comfort zones. Change management is imminent, but the expectations should be right.

SAP ERP does not do a great job in automating processes, but it is wonderful in integration. It will take some time before automation becomes a key focus area for an ERP product.

Automation is possible, provided the organization is mature enough to handle it with candor. And that takes years of understanding of their own business, working in ERP systems, integrating with each other and good people. But when the focus is to have maximum possible output with minimum amount of money, the result is an unabated quest for more developments, more configurations, more and more…We Indians want more car per car, quality be damned!

When I asked some of my client team members the expansion of SAP, they though Automation was the middle name in SAP!